As China steadily expands its claims to maritime territory in the South China Sea, piling sand atop reefs to construct — and militarize — new islets, more and more US military exercises are being conducted in the region. In 2021, the United States dispatched four carrier strike groups, two amphibious ready groups, eleven nuclear-powered attack submarines, and twenty-two bombers to the South China Sea. Large aircraft drilled 1,200 reconnaissance sorties. Meanwhile, China’s “military-civil fusion” strategy includes progressively equipping huge numbers of civilian and scientific vessels with surveillance equipment and dispatching them toward the contested Spratly Islands and elsewhere in the South China Sea. The Chinese incursions into Taiwanese airspace that followed US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s high-profile visit to the country did little to ease tensions.

It looks much like a dress rehearsal for armed conflict. In an interview with Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, Lyle Goldstein, an expert on Chinese military development and a former professor at the US Naval War College, describes a number of harrowing scenarios for such a war. Because we don’t know the Chinese “nuclear threshold,” any attack launched by Washington could provoke nuclear retaliation. Even conventional warfare could entail huge losses.

In twenty-four iterations of an all-out war in the Taiwan Strait circa 2026, how many times would you expect the United States to win a decisive victory? About seven times, says the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an international relations and geostrategy think tank in Washington, DC, that has developed an unclassified war game — involving senior military and government officials, complex computer calculations, detailed maps, and a twenty-sided die — and played it two dozen times. The problem is that many of those wins are Pyrrhic victories, costing the United States even more lives and assets than the Chinese forces it supposedly defeats. It is a Pyrrhic victory for Taiwan too: the entire Taiwanese navy was destroyed in every single scenario, and the entire air force in most.